Summer Sports - Cricket
The tea-time break and a passing chat with an umpire. Always good banter, says Simon
pitches from testing showers “ 60 I PC APRIL/MAY 2014 Take cover: sparing the
pretty busy on match day mornings, putting up and taking down nets. Otherwise, things are pretty much the same,” he said. He’s a little less keen on the effect
Twenty20 can have on pitch work. “The 20- over game can sometimes make us groundsmen pull our hair out,” he says. “It pulls in the crowds and it’s exciting,
Sometimes the
covers were on for three or four days at a time. It was very frustrating
but they play on in pretty well all conditions, players sliding about all over the place. It poses problems when you’ve got a four-day championship game coming up. This year’s new format, with Twenty20s being played on Fridays throughout the summer rather than in a block of games in June and July, is going to be testing, as there’s nearly always a Championship game starting forty-eight hours later on Sundays.” “It was fairly workable when there was a
Twenty20 ‘season’ and other cricket took a back seat. Often as not, you could use a strip twice. The powers in the game seem to want the best pitches for Twenty20 nowadays, with Championship fixtures maybe playing second fiddle. I think television has a big say in this and Sky cameras are going to be here this summer for four matches at least.” It was the record-breaking wet winter that
Assistant head groundsman Adrian Llong re-seeding the square
What’s in the shed John Deere 720 mower Lloyds Paladin pitch mowers x 2 Auto Rollers x 2 Toro ProCore 648 Charterhouse Verti-Drain 7212
Allett mower Ransomes Matador Sisis Hydromain Sisis Variseeder
was Simon’s immediate concern though. Players were due back from their various winter assignments on St Patrick’s Day and the first pre-season friendly due before March was out. A sequence of downpours had washed away seed from the square, Simon tells me, and re-seeding was under way that very day. As I walk back towards the pitch, between the Woolley and Cowdrey stands, I can see a Sisis Variseeder in action. Warmer spring conditions were in the offing, but Simon said germination sheets would be used to speed things up, if necessary. Fifteen of the strips across the square
would be used this coming season for First Class cricket, four of them - plus the practice area in front of the Frank Woolley stand - would be used by the players pretty soon in the warm-up to actual fixtures. The re-seeding, incidentally, was being done by Simon’s Assistant Head Groundsman Adrian Llong, whose brother Nigel was a distinguished Kent player not so
long ago and is now on the ICC’s elite umpiring panel handling tests and ODIs around the world. For Simon, now in his second year as
Head Groundsman, the weather had made it one of the worst pre-seasons he could remember since joining Kent’s ground staff in 1997. Even in the first week of March the outfield had been under water because of the relentless rainfall, and he and his team had been unable to get on the square for weeks on end. There is a system of lateral drainage channels that feed into main drains at either end of the square, which run into a soakaway at the bottom end of the ground. It works well and had been put to the test day after day. Installation was done in 2000 and has been a very effective investment for the club, says Simon. It is the steep slope from one side of the
ground to the other that provides a natural flow, yet puts the square under threat after heavy rainfall. It was Brian Fitch, perhaps Kent’s most celebrated groundsman, in charge at the ground for twenty-nine years, who actually measured it. The near 12-foot drop from the stand-alone Les Ames Stand at the ground’s Nackington Road end to the Pavilion area is actually steeper than the much-hyped Lord’s slope. Simon tells me that in normal rainfall
conditions they don’t have to cover anywhere near as much as they did pre- drainage channel days to divert water from the Ames Stand high point from affecting the square. Since December, rainfall had been unprecedented and covering became a priority as never before. “We started putting covers on half the
square and all of the practice area in the last week of January because we knew that, if we didn’t, we’d not get the work done in time for pre-season,” said Simon. “We just had to keep this area dry so that, when and if there were breaks in the weather, we could get to work. Sometimes the covers were on for three or four days at a time. It was very frustrating.” The covers did manage to keep them
ahead of the game, yet covering brings its own problems of course and a contact fungicide (Chipco Green) application became
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